KING OLAF'S DEATH-DRINK. All day has the battle raged, The vengeance of Eric the Earl. And the spears the champions hurl. They drift as wrecks on the tide, The shouts are feeble and few. See her sailors come back o'er the main ; Or asleep in the billows blue! On the deck stands Olaf the King; The spears that the foemen fling And the stones they hurl with their hands. In the midst of the stones and the spears Kolbiorn, the Marshal, appears, His shield in the air he uprears, By the side of King Olaf he stands. Over the slippery wreck Of the Long Serpent's deck Seeking King Olaf then, Of the bear, when he stands at bay. "Remember Jarl Hakon!" he cries; When lo! on his wondering eyes, Two kingly figures arise Two Ólafs in warlike array! Then Kolbiorn speaks in the ear With a smile on his tremulous lip; Two scarlet meteors' glare, And both have leaped from the ship. Earl Eric's men in the boats Sea-current's eddying ring. There is told a wonderful tale, As he swam beneath the main ; Was King Olaf seen again. -The Saga of King Olaf, Rune XXI. SAINTE-BEUVE, CHARLES AUGUSTUS, a French critic, born at Boulogne-sur-Mer, December 23, 1804; died in Paris, October 13, 1869. He was a posthumous child, and inherited his literary tastes from his father. After completing his education in Paris, he studied medicine, and when the Globe, a liberal newspaper, was founded in 1827, he contributed to it many historical and literary articles, which attracted the attention of Goethe. His papers on Victor Hugo's Odes and Ballads led to a friendship with this great poet, and to a connection with the romantic school of poets. His articles on the French poetry of the sixteenth century were issued in book-form in 1828, and were followed by a third volume, Vie, Poesies et Pensées de Joseph Delorme (1829). Another volume, the Consolations (1830), reflect his most intimate thoughts, and to this book, reflecting the most interesting period of his life, he was wont to turn with the utmost pleasure. He contributed to the Revue de Paris, and also to the Revue des Deux Mondes, founded in 1831. In 1840 he was made keeper of the Mazarin Library, and a member of the Academy in 1844. In that year he accepted the chair of French literature in the University of Liège, where he gave a series of lectures on Chateaubriand and his contemporaries, afterward published in two volumes. Returning to Paris, he agreed to supply the Constitutional with an article for every Monday's issue, thus beginning the celebrated Causeries du Lundi, which he continued for three years. In 1857 he held a similar post for the Moniteur. These articles, with others entitled Nouveaux Lundis, were subsequently published in twenty-eight volumes. In 1854 he was given the chair of Latin poetry at the College of France, and from 1858 to 1861 was lecturer on French literature at the École Normale Supérieure. SainteBeuve was admitted to the Legion d'Honneur in 1859. His other works are a novel, Volupté (1834); Pensées d'Août (1837), and seven volumes of Portraits Contemporains, contributed originally to the Revue de Paris and the Revue des Deux Mondes. His industry may be measured by the fact of his preparing for many years a grand review article once a quarter, and a newspaper review once a week. He says: "On Monday toward noon I lift up my head and breathe for an hour; after that the wicket shuts again, and I am in my prison-cell for seven days." Matthew Arnold pays the following tribute to this great and impartial critic: "As a guide to bring us to a knowledge of the French genius and literature, he is unrivalledperfect, so far as a poor mortal critic can be perfect, in knowledge of his subject, in judgment, in tact, in tone. Certain spirits are of an excellence almost ideal in certain lines; the human race might willingly adopt them as its spokesmen, recognizing that on these lines their style and utterance may stand as those, not of bounded individuals, but of the human rac. So Homer speaks for the human race, and with an excellence, which is ideal, in epic narration; Plato in the treatment, at once beautiful and profound, of philosophical questions; Shakespeare in the presentation of human character; Voltaire in light verse and ironical discussion. A list of perfect ones, indeed, each in his own line! and we may almost venture to add to their number, in his line of literary criticism, Sainte-Beuve." Selections from the Causeries du Lundi have been translated with a Memoir by William Matthews (1877). GUIZOT. Sprung from a Calvinist family, he has kept up a certain austere tone of theirs, a talent for comprehending and reproducing those tenacious natures, those energetic and gloomy inspirations. The habits of race and early education stamp themselves on the talents and reappear in the speech, even when they have disappeared from the habits of our life; we keep their fibre and their tone. The men, the characters, are expressed, as we meet them, by vigorous strokes ; but the whole lacks a certain splendor, or rather a certain continuous animation. The personages do not live with a life of theit own; the historian takes them, seizes them, and gives their profile in brass. His plan applies a very bold and confident execution. He knows what he wants to say, and where he wants to go. The ridiculous and ironical side of things, the sceptical side, of which no other historians make too much, has with him no place. He shows plainly a kind of moral gravity in men amid their manoeuvrings and intrigues; but he does not set the contradiction in a sufficiently strong light. He gives us, on the way, many stale maxims, but none of those moral reflections which instruct and delight, which recreate humanity and restore it to itself, like those which escape incessantly from Voltaire. His style, which is emphatically his own, is sad and never laughs. I have given myself the pleasure of reading at the same time |